California law banning bots from pretending to be real people without disclosure

It’s a start, it should cover Facebook and Google.

>If a caller demanded to know the rep's HIV status, we wouldn't insist the company disclose it.

Because it has no bearing.

I think a more interesting question is if they wanted to know health information that would be relevant, such as specific mental abnormalities that would influence a person's ability to lie. Then again, even that question is moot because when you ask someone if they are a liar, the truth tellers and liars both answer no.

Current location matters because of laws. If the other individual is in the US, I have a better idea of what recourse I have if my information is misused.

And I don't think this can be dismissed outright as contrived and unreasonable, especially in some cases like doing business in China where IP is treated very differently

But if we use the excuse of the customer having a right to know the laws that bind whom they are talking to, gender and race become an interesting case as well. In a fair and just world, they shouldn't matter one bit. But given our current world, we know that the legal system is not applied to them equally. Racial and gender disparities in sentences can be off by a factor of 27 (this was a back of the napkin estimate I did some years ago based on sentencing data, and was based on the same crime, so it does not include any disparity in what charges are brought). Does a customer have a right to know that the person they are talking to is privileged when it comes to laws being applied and thus has less disincentive to engage in illegal behavior?

>If some portion of the population strongly believes that foreign call centers are lower quality, are you going to get the best possible answers on a survey if you say, "this was a foreign call center, how was the quality?"

Self reports are one of the worst forms of data collection, so it is a bit sad that so many companies still depend only among it when rating their employees. More objective metrics have massive problems with being gamed, but at least they are more objective.

If someone were to post on twitter about how they would murder Samsung executives, then no matter how many small print disclaimers saying that 'they were talking about killing the expectations of the executives by showing them an enjoyable time like no other' would save them from legal prosecution. Advertisements should be treated the same. The way normal people view implications in the ads constitute the actual ad and no amount of fine print can change that.

Firstly, the theory in question is so vague it's hard to say what they are really claiming.

But secondly and more importantly, even if what you say is true, the theory is still total nonsense!

Where is the evidence for any of this? Where are the networks of bots that were caught spamming low-intelligence identically worded political comments, yet somehow can't be caught by normal spam filters? Where is the testimony of millions of people who decide how to vote by counting duplicate tweets?

This entire theory is literally a conspiracy theory. Like all conspiracy theories, when basic questions are asked it suddenly shapeshifts and starts to claim something different but still wrong.

I don't believe any such bots exist: can anyone show me the evidence that they do? I mean real, first-hand evidence, not assertions of dubious self-proclaimed experts with an agenda.

I can for sure tell you that real humans are routinely labelled as "bots" by people who believe in this conspiracy theory, and can cite evidence:

1. It's happened to me.

2. It's happened to other people:

https://sputniknews.com/europe/201804211063771932-Smeared-Ru...

That may have been the end of it, but then Ian took an invitation to appear on Sky News. The news anchors began by asking the man, who appeared on video remotely, whether he was truly a "Russian bot." "That is 100 percent a total lie and complete fabrication by the UK government," Ian said, with a British accent.

Here's a related case. In fairness, this time it's about "Russian trolls" not "Russian bots", although I've noticed people tend to use the terms interchangeably:

https://order-order.com/2017/11/15/byline-outs-russian-troll...

The Twitter account in question turned out to be a Scottish car park security guard.

Here's a third case of real people being accused of being political bots:

https://www.wired.com/story/how-americans-wound-up-on-twitte...

3. Any time any detail or basic question about this theory is raised, this is exactly what happens - someone pops up saying nobody is claiming the bots are genuinely artificially intelligent, or the claims are changed in other subtle ways. But yes, that's exactly what this very article is claiming:

"The first bots, short for chatbots, couldn’t hide their artificiality. When they were invented, back in the nineteen-sixties, they weren’t capable of manipulating their users. Most bot creators worked in university labs and didn’t conjure these programs to exploit the public. Today’s bots have been designed to achieve specific goals by appearing human and blending into the cacophony of online voices"

The justification for this law is literally that people think AGI has been achieved and is "manipulating" voters by spreading "false narratives". But it's not true, is it?

New addition to every EULA: "XYZ Corp is a member of the Rand-Turing coalition, an industry cooperative dedicated to the philosophical belief that all human beings are robots. Based on this, every interaction you have with us will be an interaction with a robot. By signing this license agreement you agree that all members of our corporation from the lowest janitor up to the CEO, are all robots."